'Unionist Derry is Ulster's Panama': The Northern Ireland Labour Party and the Civil Rights Issue

摘要

Debates over the nature, significance and legacy of the Northern Ireland civil rights movement tend to stress its Catholic and irredentist character. This article takes a different approach by examining the role of those activists from a Protestant and socialist background who played important roles in agitating for redress of socio-economic and political grievances. In particular, the article focuses on the involvement of individual members of the bi-confessional Northern Ireland Labour Party (NILP) in the civil rights movement in the 1960s. It considers the NILP's relationship to other civil rights bodies, such as the Campaign for Social Justice and the Campaign for Democracy in Ulster, and asks how its approach differed. Drawing on extensive empirical research - including previously untapped archival sources and oral histories - the article also sets out to challenge the orthodox public and academic interpretation of the civil rights movement as ostensibly anti-partitionist in political orientation or devoid of significant Protestant and socialist participation. The central argument is that the NILP remained ill-equipped to become the political vanguard of the radical street politics, not because it was tethered to a narrow non-sectarian agenda but because it was deeply wedded to the process and fundamentals of British parliamentary democracy. Unionists will assert that they cannot, in any circumstances, afford the blow to their prestige of losing control of Derry - in short, 'the end justifies the means'. Unionist Derry is Ulster's Panama. (Senior NILP Strategist Charles Brett, The Guardian, 4 March 1964)